"That bleb Quayle," muttered Captain Kewley of the Sincerity to his Manx crew. "If he hadn't have kept the cheese we'd have fooled that sleetch Clarke. Now, we've got to pay a £200 fine. Where will we get the jink?"

"I can prove the atheisms of geology," exclaimed the Rev Geoffrey Wilson. "Having studied the bible, I am certain the garden of Eden is to be found in Van Diemen's Land."

"I am bound there myself," replied Dr Thomas Potter, who was engaged on a biological study of the races. "From a study of specimens I believe that the Celts = Untrustworthy and Blacks = Savages . Ergo Both Destined to Die in great Conflagration. We should mount a joint expedition. I have heard there is a boat for charter."

"Cape Town is a lousy place," snurled Kewley. "What use is a free port to a smuggler? We'll be better off in Hobart."

"Look at those scuttering white pissers," thought Peevay, the half-caste Aborigine. "I should have speared them like Mother said."

"Will you be our guide?" asked Rev Wilson.

"No, I won't do that."

"I hear he's changed his mind," said Dr Potter, several days later.

"It was that red-beard shitter Potter that made off with Mother's body," Peevay said to himself, "and none of the other nums would lift a finger to help a black fellow. I will kill them."

"So near, yet so far to Eden," Rev Wilson repeated deliriously.

Wilson = quite deranged " wrote Potter in his diary. "No food left = big problem . We have lost Ben Fiddler. Hooper suggesting could = work of half caste ."

"Scuttering shitters," said Peevay, "I'd have had the nums if the ship hadn't come."

"You go somewhere remote to do a bit of running business and you bump into these fritlags again," mused Captain Kewley, as Wilson and Potter came aboard.

"The Lord has saved us," intoned Wilson.

"It looks as if we got away with it," said Kewley on his return to London, as he spotted a skeleton labelled Aboriginal at an exhibition that showed every sign of having had a red beard.

And if you really are pressed: The digested read, digested: The doctor, the vicar, the smuggler and the aborigine venture into Tasmania's Heart of Darkness